McCartney and Coward met at a party and, while Coward was friendly to McCartney and Lennon, who was also present, he later said to a reporter, "The Beatles, those two I met, seemed nice, pleasant young men.... Of course, they are totally devoid of talent." Later, Coward later to a concert by the group in Rome (he was horrified by the hordes of screaming teenagers and later said, "I should have liked to take some of those squealing young maniacs and cracked their heads together") and went to visit the Beatles after the show. Brian Epstein informed him that the Beatles hadn't been very pleased by his comments in the press and didn't want to say hello. Coward asked Epstein's assistant to go get one of the Beatles, and McCartney came out. "I explained gently but firmly that one did NOT pay much attention to the statements of newspaper reporters.... The poor boy was quite amiable and I sent messages of congratulations to his colleagues." However, Coward said that despite these remarks to McCartney, he considered them "bad-mannered."
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
